NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WSMV) - In Rutherford County, Friday night football games have long brought communities together, with proud traditions at schools like Riverdale High. But this fall, a different kind of clash is taking place off the field — a divisive battle over whether certain books need to be pulled from library shelves.

Since February, the Rutherford County Board of Education has banned 35 books, including well-known young adult novels such as Wicked, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and Beloved by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison. These books were available in high school libraries, though none were part of the district’s curriculum.

The book bans were initiated by board member Caleb Tidwell, who flagged the titles as sexually explicit under school board policy and state obscenity laws.

An inquiry group setup by the U.K.’s antitrust authority has provisionally found that Apple’s policies are “holding back innovation in the browsers we use to access the web on mobile phones.”

While the report focuses substantively on Apple, it also highlighted a revenue-sharing agreement with Google, noting that the duo “earn significant revenue” when Google Chrome is used on iOS, which reduces their “financial incentives to compete.” 

The announcement comes in the same week as the Department of Justice (DoJ) in the U.S. said that Google should divest its Chrome browser, after a judge ruled in August that the internet giant was tantamount to an illegal monopoly on online search.

An online course founded by far-right influencer Andrew Tate was breached by hackers, revealing the email addresses of roughly 325,000 users.

The self-described online university, known as The Real World, offers users “advanced training and mentoring” for around $50 per month. Formerly known as Hustler’s University, the platform focuses on topics such as health and fitness, financial investment, and e-commerce businesses.

“Money making is a skill,” the website states. “We will teach you how to master it.”

On Thursday, the hackers made their actions known by flooding the course’s primary chatroom with emojis they uploaded while Tate was streaming an episode of his show “Emergency Meeting” on Rumble. 

The emojis included a transgender flag, a feminist fist, an AI-generated image of Tate draped in a rainbow flag, another where his buttocks are enlarged, and the cat character used in the “boykisser” meme.

For years, hashing technology has made it possible for platforms to automatically detect known child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) to stop kids from being retraumatized online. However, rapidly detecting new or unknown CSAM remained a bigger challenge for platforms as new victims continued to be victimized. Now, AI may be ready to change that.

Today, a prominent child safety organization, Thorn, in partnership with a leading cloud-based AI solutions provider, Hive, announced the release of an AI model designed to flag unknown CSAM at upload. It's the earliest use of AI technology striving to expose unreported CSAM at scale.

An expansion of Thorn's CSAM detection tool, Safer, the new "Predict" feature uses "advanced machine learning (ML) classification models" to "detect new or previously unreported CSAM and child sexual exploitation behavior (CSE), generating a risk score to make human decisions easier and faster."

The model was trained in part using data from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) CyberTipline, relying on real CSAM data to detect patterns in harmful images and videos. Once suspected CSAM is flagged, a human reviewer remains in the loop to ensure oversight. It could potentially be used to probe suspected CSAM rings proliferating online.

From Iraq to Afghanistan to the US, basic freedoms for women are being eroded as governments start rolling back existing laws.

Just a few months ago a ban on Afghan women speaking in public was the latest measure introduced by the Taliban, who took back control of the country in 2021. From August the ban included singing, reading aloud, reciting poetry and even laughing outside their homes.

The Taliban’s ministry for the propagation of virtue and the prevention of vice, which implements one of the most radical interpretations of Islamic law, enforces these rules. They are part of a broader set of “vice and virtue” laws that severely restrict women’s rights and freedoms. Women are even banned from reading the Quran out loud to other women in public.

In the past three years in Afghanistan, the Taliban has taken away many basic rights from women who live there, so that there’s very little that they are allowed to do.

Niantic, the company behind the extremely popular augmented reality mobile games Pokémon Go and Ingress, announced that it is using data collected by its millions of players to create an AI model that can navigate the physical world. 

In a blog post published last week, first spotted by Garbage Day, Niantic says it is building a “Large Geospatial Model.” This name, the company explains, is a direct reference to Large Language Models (LLMs) Like OpenAI’s GPT, which are trained on vast quantities of text scraped from the internet in order to process and produce natural language. Niantic explains that a Large Geospatial Model, or LGM, aims to do the same for the physical world, a technology it says “will enable computers not only to perceive and understand physical spaces, but also to interact with them in new ways, forming a critical component of AR glasses and fields beyond, including robotics, content creation and autonomous systems. As we move from phones to wearable technology linked to the real world, spatial intelligence will become the world’s future operating system.”

By training an AI model on millions of geolocated images from around the world, the model will be able to predict its immediate environment in the same way an LLM is able to produce coherent and convincing sentences by statistically determining what word is likely to follow another.

SafeRent, an AI screening tool used by landlords, will no longer use AI-powered “scores” to evaluate whether someone using housing vouchers would make a good tenant. On Wednesday, US District Judge Angel Kelley issued final approval for a roughly $2.3 million settlement to prevent SafeRent from discriminating against tenants based on income and race.

The settlement stems from a 2022 class action lawsuit filed in Massachusetts. The suit alleged that SafeRent’s scoring system disproportionately harmed people using housing vouchers — specifically Black and Hispanic applicants. In addition to violating Massachusetts law, the complaint also accused SafeRent of breaking the Fair Housing Act, which prohibits housing discrimination.

As outlined in the initial lawsuit, SafeRent’s scoring algorithm uses factors like credit history and non-rental-related debts to assign a SafeRent Score to potential tenants. Landlords can then use this score to determine whether to accept or deny someone’s rental application. The lawsuit claimed the process isn’t transparent, as SafeRent doesn’t tell landlords how it came up with a person’s score. And the system allegedly assigned lower scores unfairly for Black and Hispanic tenants, as well as people who use housing vouchers, leading landlords to deny their housing applications.

The community came together Sunday to support two transgender women who say they were attacked near a light rail station in Minneapolis. 

The incident happened Nov. 10 at Hennepin Avenue and Fifth Street in downtown Minneapolis. It's where community members gathered for a rally Sunday afternoon, one week since the attack. 

Amber Muhm, a community leader with Trans Movement for Liberation, said the two trans women were attacked by a group of men at the light rail station after one of the men used transphobic slurs.

"No one came to help them. In fact, they said people were cheering the attackers on while they were getting beaten," Muhm said.

As many users seek alternatives to X, rival social network Mastodon says that its official app downloads are up 47% on iOS.

Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko says downloads on Android are also up 17%, while total monthly sign-ups rose approximately 27% to 90,000.

The open-source X rival functions much like its competitor, the site formerly known as Twitter, on the outside. However, unlike the centralized Twitter, Mastodon consists of thousands of different social networks, which are integrated into a web it calls the "fediverse."

Apple quietly introduced code into iOS 18.1 which reboots the device if it has not been unlocked for a period of time, reverting it to a state which improves the security of iPhones overall and is making it harder for police to break into the devices, according to multiple iPhone security experts. 

On Thursday, 404 Media reported that law enforcement officials were freaking out that iPhones which had been stored for examination were mysteriously rebooting themselves. At the time the cause was unclear, with the officials only able to speculate why they were being locked out of the devices. Now a day later, the potential reason why is coming into view.

“Apple indeed added a feature called ‘inactivity reboot’ in iOS 18.1.,” Dr.-Ing. Jiska Classen, a research group leader at the Hasso Plattner Institute, tweeted after 404 Media published on Thursday along with screenshots that they presented as the relevant pieces of code.

JD Vance has suggested that American support for NATO should be predicated on the European Union not regulating Elon Musk and his X social media platform, formerly known as Twitter.

The Republican vice presidential nominee and Ohio senator claimed in an interview with YouTuber Shawn Ryan that a top EU official had threatened to arrest the billionaire if he allowed former President Donald Trumpback on X. 

“The leader, I forget exactly which official it was within the European Union, but sent Elon this threatening letter that basically said, ‘We’re going to arrest you if you platform Donald Trump,’ who, by the way, is the likely next president of the United States,” Vance said in the interview published last week.

Skyler Philippi, 24, of Columbia, Tennessee, was arrested by federal agents and charged with attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction and attempting to destroy an energy facility.

“As charged, Skyler Philippi believed he was moments away from launching an attack on a Nashville energy facility to further his violent white supremacist ideology – but the FBI had already compromised his plot,” said Attorney General Merrick B. Garland. “This case serves as yet another warning to those seeking to sow violence and chaos in the name of hatred by attacking our country’s critical infrastructure: the Justice Department will find you, we will disrupt your plot, and we will hold you accountable. I am grateful to the public servants of the FBI for their extraordinary work on this case and for the work they do every day to keep our country safe.”

“Those fueled by hate and inspired to violence by racial or ethnic bias pose a grave threat to our national security,” said Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco. “As alleged in today’s charges, Skyler Philippi, a man dedicated to white supremacist ideology and the destruction of our critical infrastructure, planned to attack Nashville’s power grid using a drone carrying an explosive device. Thanks to brave work by the FBI, his scheme was thwarted. We will continue to work with our law enforcement partners to identify, disrupt, and hold accountable those who seek to wage such hate-fueled violence, which has no place in America or anywhere else.”